Last night was the World Cup semi-final match of Germany vs.
Spain, and, after a week of listening to the little boy on my block shout
«¡ESPAÑA! ¡ESPAÑA! ¡ESPAÑA! ¡Es que somos los mejores!» I have to confess I was
kind of hoping Spain would lose.
Four days ago in Aranda del Duero a few kilometers outside
Burgos, the former base of General Franco’s Nationalist government during the
Spanish Civil War, one of the many mass graves which had been ignored for 70
years was opened and the remains of victims of el franquismo from were
identified and returned to their families for a proper burial. It is a measure of the degree of denial the
State has maintained to its complicated past that it was only in 2006, more
than thirty years after the death of El Generalísmo that a law was created to
document the various crimes committed on behalf of his fascist government. And it is a measure of the degree of denial
the State maintains to its complicated past that the task of confronting these
crimes is done primarily by foreign volunteer workers and not civil
servants. Baltasar Garzón, a left-wing
Spanish judge, led the controversial campaign to combat the general amnesty
created in 1977 with the Pacto del olvido (the Pact to Forget) by attempting to
charge Franco’s government with crimes against humanity; he had been
instrumental in the process of identifying the remains of some of the 114,000
estimated victims on the losing Republican side of the war, but was recently
suspended from the court having been charged by other members with political
ties to Franco’s Spain as violating the terms of the 1977 agreement.
Fascism still looms, quietly but powerfully. Today a cab driver told me it was a relief to
be able to wave the Spanish flag in celebration of Spain’s 1-0 defeat against
Germany, that this country, with its factions of Catalonian and Basque
separatists, finally had a chance to feel unified in victory. I asked him if the waving of the Spanish Flag
still had certain unsavory Nationalist undertones, and he spoke to me of the
moros y delincuentes who have taken over different neighborhoods in Madrid,
including the one I live in, Lavapiés. (Moro, or Moor, is what a certain kind
of Spaniard calls anyone with dark skin, be they North African, East Indian, or
Latino).
Still, Lavapiés is different, and thank god for that. Last
night my friend and I ate on the terrace of an Indian restaurant while the rest
of Madrid watched the game. We went inside to pay the bill and were surprised
to discover that over a dozen men from India, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka were
watching the game with the same enthusiasm and nervousness as the Spanish
teenagers down the road, and we joined them for the last ten minutes of the
game to watch Spain clinch its place in the World Cup Final. As the men shouted
and cheered and waved the Spanish flag it occurred to me that the very people
looked down upon as delincuentes by certain kinds of Spaniards are perhaps the
very persons capable of saving Spain from entrapment in its own past. Of
course, with unemployment in Spain hovering at twenty percent, the highest rate
of any EU member country and nearly triple that of Germany's, we can only hope
that Sunday’s match gives all of Spain’s residents relief from the constant
reminders of the difficulties which lie ahead.
Kathleen Heil
julio 2010